Calvet's Web

Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Laurence Brockliss

Throws new light on the relationship between the French Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment

Provides a fascinating insight into the lives of a small group of intellectuals in eighteenth-century France

Calvet's Web

Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Laurence Brockliss

Description

Calvet's Web is a study of the correspondence network of an Avignon physician in the period 1750-1810. Esprit Calvet was an antiquarian, natural historian, and bibliophile, and was at the centre of a circle of like-minded intellectuals from various backgrounds, chiefly based in the Rhone valley. Laurence Brockliss explores for the first time an important contribution to our understanding of the social construction of knowledge, and offers a new picture of the relationship between the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment.

Calvet's Web

Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Laurence Brockliss

Table of Contents

Introduction: Republic of Letters and Enlightenment1. Esprit Calvet2. The intellectual milieu3. The physician4. The antiquarian5. The natural historian6. The bibliophile7. The revolutionary climacteric8. Conclusion: Enlightenment and Republic of Letters

Calvet's Web

Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Laurence Brockliss

Author Information

Laurence Brockliss is a Reader in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Calvet's Web

Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Laurence Brockliss

Reviews and Awards

"LWB Brockliss's study of Esprit-Claude-Francois Calvet (1728-1810), Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France, presents a very good picture of the life of a medical doctor and scholar. Brockliss's study is the result of extensive work in the archives that contain many details of Calvet's life and collections..."-- HISTORY: Reviews of New Books

"The book differs from most studies of the Enlightenment in that its center is not the Paris salon and the philosophes who frequented it, but decentralized, epistolary community of stolid, upwardly mobile provincial scholars."--CHOICE

"Brockliss's book has the virtue of making exhaustive use of [Calvet's large archive] to reconstruct his life. He is examined not only in his role as a man of letters in contact with other men of letters, but as a doctor, a natural historian, an antiquary and a cosmologist..."--Times Literary Supplement